Jack Kelly
ITS hard to win a war if you quit fighting in the middle of it. Thats the lesson we should learn from Ethiopias New Years message to us. Six months ago, when the militia of the Union of Islamic Courts seized the Somali capital of Mogadishu, it appeared that the al-Qaeda-affiliated radicals were on the verge of a major triumph. The redoubtable StrategyPage declared them unstoppable, and the usual hand-wringers were urging us to negotiate with them.
All Islamic extremists are unlovely, but the Union of Islamic Courts are a particularly nasty bunch. They modeled themselves on the (now deposed) Taliban in Afghanistan, and imposed their harsh version of Sharia (Islamic law) on the territory they controlled. Movies and the playing of music were banned. So were smoking tobacco and chewing khat, a mild hallucinogen. Women were barred from beaches. People who didnt pray five times a day were threatened with beheading. More than 20,000 Somalis fled in small boats across the Gulf of Aden to seek sanctuary in Yemen, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Thousands more clogged refugee camps in neighboring countries.
In November, the Union of Islamic Courts began an offensive against the provincial capital of Baidoa, where the U.N.-recognized government of Somalia had taken refuge, and announced plans to extend its jihad to Ethiopia, Somalias neighbor to the west, and Kenya, its neighbor to the south. But all that changed in the last week of 2006. A Reuters dispatch Dec. 28 indicates why: The bloated corpses of Islamist fighters and an unbroken line of tank tracks along the Baidoa-Mogadishu highway tell the story of a swift advance for the Somali government and its Ethiopian allies.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/06/2007 13:47 ||
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#1
"the surest way to win in war is to kill the enemy"
The Dems and Leftists (but I repeat myself) know this.
Which tells us that, since they don't want our military to do that, they don't want us to win.
At anything.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
01/06/2007 14:45 Comments ||
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#2
While I agree with most of this piece I think the real test for the Ethiopians and the farce that is the UN recognized government is yet to come. How will these forces react once the suicide bombings start and the aid agencies object to any attempt to stop them; let alone once CNN puts a "reporter" in whatever passes for a decent hotel in Mogadishu.
In the barren, rocky landscape of the West Bank in the northern Jordan Valley, Yossi Hazut and his family, expelled from Israeli settlements in Gaza, dream of reconstructing their Zionist dream.
Last week, the Israeli government approved this site at Maskiot, a former military base, to become the first new Israeli settlement to be authorised in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1992.
Hazut and his comrades are hoping to soon see 30 new houses rise up on the arid slopes of the Samaria hills. The 27-year-old, with fire in his eyes, brushes off international condemnation of the Israeli government's green light for the construction of the new settlement. "This is Israeli land," he says, eating soup. "The Jordan Valley, this is our security belt. It is of utmost importance for the people of Israel that we be here."
For 10 months, Hazut and more than a dozen other families who were uprooted from Israel's settlement of Shirat Hayam in the Gaza Strip in September 2005 have camped out in a mobile home in the neighbouring settlement of Hemdat, on a hilltop overlooking the majestic Jordan Valley.
During the Gaza pullout, these families lived through the pain of being forced from their homes. But when it was time to choose a new place to settle, they again opted to lay roots in occupied territory that could one day potentially become part of a Palestinian state should a global peace deal finally be reached. "We went the see the settlements in the Galilee, in the Golan and then Maskiot," he says. "We voted and Maskiot was chosen."
"Our approach is Zionist and political. Our mission is here."
If Israeli government construction of the new pre-fabricated homes in Maskiot begins before the end of January as Hazut hopes, they will take several months to be finished. Hazut plans to surround the houses with date palms and grapevines.
If it sees the light of day, the new settlement will be next to a base built by the Israeli army in Maskiot in 1982, which was transformed three years ago into a "Pre-Military Torah Institute", which prepares 45 young religious Jews for service in the Israeli army. The programme includes 12 to 18 months of physical training, weapons handling, and courses in the Torah, Jewish culture and Israeli military history.
Rabbi Shlomo Azuelos (48) directs the institute. "The coming of the settlers will provide needed vital fresh air to this region," he says. "Here, we have a pioneer, Zionist spirit. To make the arid hills fertile. Be here where we are needed, and not where it is pleasant to be."
The modest white buildings of the institute stand on terraces of red earth, connected by rocky paths, between shrubs and flowers. On the side, there is a small enclosure for donkeys and two camels.
On the wall of the refectory hang photos of students lying on their stomachs firing M-16 assault rifles, on patrols in the desert, playing paint-ball, or beaming in swimsuits under a waterfall.
Shai Eigner (19) is one of them. Five years ago, he was waiting for his school bus when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up 3m from him. His right arm was partially ripped off, his hand decimated, his chest studded with shrapnel. He was declared severely disabled and judged unfit for military duty by doctors. He is in Maskiot to prepare for new tests and to "manage to enter a combat unit".
"A colony must be established here," says the young man with a short beard and a serious stare. "It's up to us, just like throughout the land of Israel. We have to populate this region. Because if we are not here, the Arabs will come."
One person we will be hearing much about in 2007 will be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He's the hollow-eyed engineer and town planner (and former Revolutionary Guard) who in 2005 went from being Teheran's answer to Ken Livingstone to President of Iran. He's the fellow stringing along the international community while his scientists try to manufacture a nuclear bomb before America or Israel decides to degrade or destroy key experimental sites. He says appalling things with demented glee in his eyes.
According to today's Spectator, Ahmadinejad may actually welcome such an attack, since this will "justify" a retaliatory strike against Israel with nuclear weapons acquired from the former Soviet Union. Certainly, Iran's dark role in arming Hizbollah, and even darker machinations in Iraq, suggest an almost wilful disregard for consequences.
Who is Ahmadinejad? In some respects, he resembles those with whom he consorts to ramble on about American imperialism and the wretched of the earth: Hugo Chávez, Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro. Actually, Ahmadinejad is subtly different: you have to grasp a fusion of apocalyptic piety and politics to get what he is about.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
